Tag: Ghosts

A ghost is supposedly “the soul or spirit of a dead person or animal that can appear to the living.” So, to believe in ghosts it would seem you would have to believe that living things have “souls” or “spirits.” “Souls” are defined as “the spiritual or immaterial part of a human being or animal, regarded as immortal,” and “spirit,” in this context, is defined as “the nonphysical part of a person that is the seat of emotions and character; the soul.”

If we are to accept evolution, at what point would there be any evolutionary pressure for a “soul” to evolve in ANY living thing? What would be the evolutionary advantage that would drive it?

Of course, it would seem that you would also have to believe in the supernatural to believe in “souls” (by any literal definition), and there isn’t any empirical evidence for anything supernatural. So, most people who believe in them seem to be theists who believe that everyone has an immortal soul that will somehow exist beyond death for eternity in some kind of afterlife. And many of them believe the “soul” enters the body at the point of conception, which is why many of them are supposedly opposed to abortion.

And it seems to be a point of contention among believers in the supernatural if other lifeforms have “souls” besides humans. It seems dogs (as one example) may be excluded from heaven according to the beliefs of some (because only humans are “special” enough to merit “souls”). And, of course, some argue that any potential human clones would not have “souls.”

The way a lot of theists seem to think about it is that the physical human is just some kind of an avatar for the actual person, who only truly exists as a “soul” (independent of the material world).

Consider the case of Charles Whitman. According to Wikipedia, “Charles Joseph Whitman (June 24, 1941 – August 1, 1966) was an American mass murderer who became infamous as the ‘Texas Tower Sniper’. On August 1, 1966, he murdered his mother and wife in their homes, then went to the University of Texas at Austin where he shot and killed three people inside the university’s tower. He then went to the tower’s 28th-floor observation deck, where he fired at random for some 96 minutes, killing an additional eleven people and wounding thirty-one before being shot and killed by police. Sixteen people were killed in total; a 17th victim died in 2001 from injuries sustained in the attack.”

The day before he committed the mass killing, he wrote:

“I do not quite understand what it is that compels me to type this letter. Perhaps it is to leave some vague reason for the actions I have recently performed. I do not really understand myself these days. I am supposed to be an average reasonable and intelligent young man. However, lately (I cannot recall when it started) I have been a victim of many unusual and irrational thoughts. These thoughts constantly recur, and it requires a tremendous mental effort to concentrate on useful and progressive tasks.”

According to Wikipedia, “In his note, he went on to request an autopsy be performed on his remains after he was dead to determine if there had been a discernible biological contributory cause for his actions and for his continuing and increasingly intense headaches.”

The autopsy found that he had a “pecan-sized” brain tumor. Texas Governor John Connally commissioned a task force to look into the matter. Psychiatric contributors to the report concluded that the “tumor conceivably could have contributed to his inability to control his emotions and actions.”

Assuming the brain tumor had something to do with Charles Whitman’s actions, was his “soul” sending commands to his human avatar that were being blocked by the tumor? Was his “soul” responsible for his actions, or had his “soul” lost control of his physical mind? If we presume the latter case, it would seem the “soul” only has limited control of its human avatar that can be overpowered by the physical/material world.

This is probably only one of the most dramatic examples of a multitude of recorded instances where people have been known to start acting and behaving differently as a result of damage to the brain (either from physical injury or from other reasons like tumors or dementia). Where would we even begin to consider the “soul” responsible vs. some physical element?

I think this calls into question the whole idea of a supernatural “soul” having any kind of control at all. If we believed that it did, we would either have to accept that it could easily be thwarted by physical/material happenstance, OR that the “emotions and character” of the “soul” happened to change–just by coincidence–at the same time that damage to the brain occurred.

There are many other things that might be unpacked here (like why are there so many reports of ghosts wearing clothes; or what enables them to float and pass through walls, but keeps them attached to the earth; or if all aborted fetuses go to heaven, what’s so bad about that, etc. but I’ll not go into all that here).

The main thing I want to keep focus on here is how a immaterial, supernatural “soul” can have ANY influence or communication with the physical person while the person is living.

The most interesting answer to this question seems to have been resolved when the Higgs Boson was discovered in 2012.

Cosmological physicists such as Sean Carroll and Brian Cox make the argument that the physics we currently know is sufficient to rule out the possibility of such things as ghosts. As Carroll says, “Within QFT [Quantum Field Theory], there can’t be a new collection of ‘spirit particles’ and ‘spirit forces’ that interact with our regular atoms, because we would have detected them in existing experiments.”

If this is the case, then it would seem to also rule out any definition of a “spiritual/supernatural” god who could interact with the material world. In other words, this may be empirical evidence that “gods” (by any definition that matters to us) don’t exist.